


hope inside the fire

by hellebored



Series: freedom's in the fighting [2]
Category: Helix (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-14 23:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16051196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellebored/pseuds/hellebored
Summary: Anana accompanies Julia and Sergio to St. Germain.Companion piece tofreedom's in the fighting.





	hope inside the fire

**Author's Note:**

> Set in _freedom’s in the fighting_ ‘verse, because I really wanted to see what happens when you drop Anana into the weirdass shit that is season 2 and how she deals with the unsavory bitch of a situation that is Michael, Anne, and Amy.
> 
> This has the same heavily implied sexually traumatic content as canon. Also lots of references to teeth (see previous point).

 

DAY 9

 

The first night they spend in the Abbey, Sergio knocks on the door to the small room Anana’s been given, flashlight in hand.

“Problem?” she asks, leaning out to glance past him, but he shakes his head.

“Just wanted to talk.”

“Good,” Anana says, closing the door behind him, “because this place gives me the creeps. I could use the company.”

“You haven’t dealt with a cult on an island with no easy exit before? Thought that was standard training.”

“Maybe fifteen years ago, old man,” she says, mouth quirking as she finishes the task he'd interrupted of cleaning and reassembling her gun, and then she settles on the edge of her desk; it’s tall enough she has to touch the floor with the tips of her boots.

“So, thoughts?”

Sergio raises a brow and shrugs. “It’s a graveyard. Whatever Julia needs we get it and get out. The earlier the better, but I’m not allowed to take the kid gloves off.”

Anana exhales an amused breath through her nose. “She said don’t kill anybody, I didn’t hear anything against knocking some heads together to see what rattles out.”

“That's the backup. We try Julia’s way first and if that fails, we use ours.”

Anana nods, tired. It isn't that she wants to resort to violence; only that over the course of the past year, she's found it's the only language a lot of people respond to.

And this place has already seen too much of it. There's a pyre still smoking in one of their lower fields, hot from the ash of dozens of bodies.

“You gonna stay?” she asks with a weary sigh. “If you stick around I might actually sleep without my boots on.”

In response Sergio pulls his sweater over his head and tosses it on the chair in the corner, so she removes her shoes and puts her tactical vest and the knife she’d had strapped to the outside of her thigh on the bedside table next to her pistol.

“This place really has you rattled,” he observes neutrally, like he’s weighing whether there’s a hint of weakness in her he needs to worry about.

She shrugs. When he steps closer she runs her finger along the hem of his collar.

“Just being cautious. You’re shirt’s inside out, by the way.”

“Do you want me to take it off?”

“Flirt,” Anana accuses, fondly. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll deal with this mess.”

He curls into bed beside her on the narrow, uncomfortable mattress; with the heavy wind against the panes and his breath against her shoulder, it feels achingly like a home she’s halfway to forgotten.

\--

 

DAY 10

 

In the morning, Julia is already waiting for them in the hallway, a slender daypack slung on one shoulder.

“Morning,” Anana says somewhat dourly. Her mouth tastes musty from the powdery residue of MREs somebody _thought_ resembled the taste of blueberry pancakes, and she hasn't had the chance so far this morning to run tap water through a filtration bottle just to safely wash out her mouth. Every scrap of food and water on the island is a possible source of contamination.

As if Julia can read her mind, she tosses over a thermos from her pack.

Anana unscrews the cap. “Coffee?”

“Instant,” Julia responds, looking amused. “If you want something fancier you can ask somebody around here if they roast their own beans.”

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Sergio says sarcastically, shifting his weight from one leg to the other with thinly-veiled impatience. “Maybe they'll brew enough for everybody in the vat they keep around for kool-aid.”

Unaffected by sarcasm and dead to attempts at humor this close to dawn, Anana shrugs and takes a swig from Julia's bottle. Other than being lukewarm, it’s not any worse than the watered-down Folgers her parents let her drink as a kid.

Apparently satisfied that everything's in order, Julia shoulders her pack and sets off briskly down the hallway at a pace Sergio matches easily, while Anana nearly has to resort to a trot.

“I need the two of you to find out what you can from Amy. I'll follow up another lead and we can reconvene later.”

“Take Anana with you. I do my best work alone.”

Anana tamps down on a spike of irritation that's not so much at splitting up as it is the implication that she'd get in his way.

Which she might.

She's not one of the meatheads they send to knock down doors and shoot up a room, but she's not the person they send when they want subtlety or restraint, either. Maybe he thinks she'll lose her temper and shoot Amy in the knees, and maybe he's right.

Anana nods, lips pursed.

“Be careful,” Sergio adds.

“You too,” Julia responds, but Anana stays silent. Safety's not a concept people like her, or Sergio for that matter, understand the meaning of anymore.

\--

“What if Mother is lost?”

“Then I’d say our deal is void.”

Outside the botany lab Anana leans against the wall while Sister Anne stands beside her straight-backed and silent. Hands in front of her, one folded over the other, she's both rigid and in repose like she’s in a coffin waiting to be buried; from what the rumors imply it’s not hard to wonder if that’s been the most she’s had to look forward to her entire life.

Anana shifts her weight. She can hear Julia arguing with the man, Peter, through the door. Apparently he’d been at Arctic Biosystems, one of the infected. And also, judging by the snippets of conversation she catches, one of Julia’s lovers.

The voices in the lab dip and then there’s a long silence. Without a word Anana pushes open the door; apparently the silent ghost of a woman at her side takes it as tacit permission to leave the space she’s been allotted and follow her into the room, where Julia stands alone.

“Words have meaning, Doctor Walker,” Sister Anne says, and her voice possesses a vein of self-assurance that grabs Anana’s attention: so she’s not spineless, after all. “They carry weight.”

Unobtrusively monitoring the conversation, Anana wanders the botany lab, slipping through rows of glass showcases filled with miniature biomes and topped with lush trailing lines of ivy. Only some of the plants are labeled, and other than a few orchids it’s hard to tell what she’s looking at, or what their intended purpose is. The equipment on the counters, a mortar and pestle, a dripping distillery, suggests at least some of the plants are for more than just decoration.

More to the point, something from inside this room may have been ground under a pestle, or run through a condenser, to create whatever killed a room full of families. Including children. Including _infants_.

Julia had said they’re not here to impose judgment. No unnecessary killing. That still leaves a lot of space for creativity, more than the average trauma nurse would be comfortable encountering in an emergency room.

Ilaria has their reasons for hurting people. Money, power: the presence of either can buy leniency, and Anana is tired of exercising restraint over shitty excuses for human beings who don’t deserve it. Tired of hurting people who don’t deserve it, too.

She thinks about small bodies tossed on a crackling fire while she paces the room and stares at notes on a clipboard outside a case of lilies, written in a scrawling hand that might be Michael’s.

_You’re lucky you’re missing, you bastard. You've got a lot to answer for._

“I’ll take you to him, but he is badly injured and might not wake,” she hears Anne saying, and pulls herself back to the conversation nearby.

“Badly injured how?” Julia asks, crossing her arms. “Is he infected?”

Sister Anne shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t believe what happened to him is infectious. Nor do I believe it was an accident.” She places a hand on Julia’s arm. “Whatever it was, something tells me it was targeted toward Landry alone, and that it poses no threat to anyone from outside the Abbey.”

“Then we’ll go see if Landry can tell us what happened to him. If not, at least it gives us some direction. Whoever’s behind this is probably the person responsible for taking Mother.”

Anana follows them out of the lab, unconsciously running a tense hand under her hair to calm the prickling feeling at the back of her neck. The lab is undeniably beautiful, but sometimes beautiful places are a lie, and all that lies beneath them are decay and death.

\--

They meet Landry in the hallway.

There’s enough time for them to see a grotesque pale face before he releases a flailing woman from his grip and flees down a side corridor.

Anana watches him retreat; he’s about twice her size, probably not someone good to fight up close, but at the end of the day she's got a gun, and large men are easier to put down than bears. She looks up at Julia and gestures the direction he’d gone with the jerk of a shoulder.

Barely turning her head, Julia holds out her hand, low. _Wait._

The slender woman Landry had dropped brushes herself off and walks toward them, apparently no worse for wear. Even with half a head on Anana’s height, she somehow gives the impression of being smaller; certainly younger, fresh out of college.

She looks familiar, and it takes Anana a moment to place her. Arctic Biosystems. Of course. With all the people showing up from that place it’s starting to feel like a dysfunctional high school reunion. If her high school had been blown up and her brother murdered inside it.

“Julia,” the girl says, sounding a little stiff, but not surprised.

“Sarah,” Julia responds hesitantly. The silence stretches while Sarah worries her lip and stares at Julia.

There’s something between the two of them, but what kind of a thing Anana can’t tell. She purses her lips to avoid a smile. Maybe _they_ were lovers too.

Looking from one of them to the other, Sister Anne bows her head slightly and says, “if you’ll excuse me, I have duties to attend to. I should find my son.”

Julia smiles, watching her go, and turns to Anana.

She drops her voice. “There’s a reason I didn’t have you follow Landry. He’s not the one who concerns me. I need you to tail her without being seen.”

There's no question in her tone about whether Anana can do it, but there doesn't need to be. Nobody stays alive long in a job like hers by getting caught.

\--

Sister Anne has soft-soled shoes that don’t transfer sound, but footsteps aren’t the only way to listen to where someone is going. The Abbey, silent as a mausoleum, amplifies the clatter of doors opening and closing; there’s also not much ambient noise besides the songbirds in the courtyard. No echo of laughter or conversation. No life.

Killing all the children would just about do it.

Anana breathes through her nose, in and out, in and out.

_Focus._

She follows Anne through several corridors, finding it easier, in some ways, than tracking fur on the tundra; there’s corners to break up sightlines, doors to slip behind: things she learned as a cop training in Toronto. Things she learned much later.

The last room Anne steps into vaults up like a cathedral, crisply whitewashed, and lined by more of the same trailing ivy from the botany lab that drapes above rows of pews finished in a dark stain. It could easily have been a church, except from what rumors say about Michael he was too egotistical to share his godhood with Jesus; and instead of the pews facing front, most of them face toward the center. She wonders if that’s meant to make it seem more egalitarian, but, notably, there’s still a place up front for somebody to preach.

A place currently occupied by Peter.

Sister Anne steps up to stand beside him. Anana stays in the shadow of the doorway. No need to get closer: sound carries well in the room, bringing their words to the side alcove where Anana waits without having to strain her ears.

“I don’t deserve their forgiveness,” Peter says about destroying Julia’s marriage, sounding raw. Julia’s words seem to have struck home.

Sister Anne’s responses are quiet and reassuring. Intimate.

Anana swallows, suddenly impatient to be anywhere else. This isn’t something for her to hear. She listens to Peter’s shame and Anne’s absolution and stares up at the alcove ceiling, vaulted and finished in burnished walnut. For a moment her chest feels tight.

_I see you, Peter. I see what your path could be. If only you could see it for yourself._

Maybe the story doesn’t always play out the same way. Maybe innocence and idealism sometimes gets rewarded. She ducks into the shadow of another alcove when they walk in her direction, and the smile on Peter’s face as he passes by, eyes fixed only on Anne, makes her throat ache.

\--

The second time Sister Anne goes into a space Anana can't follow, it's a storage room in the basement for what looks like casks of wine. Anana gets a glimpse of barrels lining the far wall before the door clicks shut behind Peter. She presses her ear against it: unlike the church-like hall, she can’t hear much more through the door than muffled conversation, the rise and fall of Peter’s voice, the steady murmur of Anne’s.

Anana surveys the surrounding corridor. Dark and poorly lit, the air carries a cave-like chill. It stinks, rich with mildew and copper.

After the emotional conversation she'd witnessed, she’d wondered if she was going to end up following them to some bedroom where she'd be forced to listen to them fuck, but if that’s what Anne’s brought him down here for, that demure facade’s hiding a woman who’s a lot kinkier than she looks.

The light goes out under the door.

Anana freezes, filtering her exhale out slowly like she’s trying to hide the puff of it from the cold air: Peter’s voice grows louder and then soft again, and then silence replaces it.

She strains to hear through the door, muscles tense. After a moment's consideration, she wedges herself between several dusty, web-filled crates, and waits in the dim shadow of a set of shelves covered in rusting garden tools.

Less than a minute later, Sister Anne emerges, Peter beside her, and locks the door behind them.

Anana waits for the sound of their voices to fade completely. Unfolding from her hiding place, she crouches by the entrance. An old lock, simple. She pulls a pair of bobby pins from her bun; bending one, she slides it into the lock and works the second in on top, feeling for the catch.

It takes several tries, tension building between her shoulder blades as she listens for voices echoing down the hall that never come. _Slow and steady._ She lets out a breath when the last ward lifts up and clicks into place.

She grins to herself. Sergio’s not the only one who can open doors.

The light inside is a pull-string hanging from the ceiling. She shuts the door and surveys the room: stacked barrels along two walls, and to her right, floor-to-ceiling shelves of jars filled with a yellow substance, perhaps applesauce. Something tells her they didn’t come down here to look at Anne’s home canning collection, so she keeps looking.

It doesn't take long. One of the large wooden barrels stands alone, lid ajar.

Anana lifts the lid back and nearly gags at the smell; the cloying copper she’d caught whiffs of from outside floods her nostrils. It doesn’t smell like blood, exactly. Not the smell of rotten flesh, either; more like poorly-preserved meat.

She leans in for a better look and immediately recoils. Not meat. _Teeth._

When bodies are burned, teeth often survive, but these… there’s still trailing strands of tissue, pulp from sockets. Incisors, molars, thousands of teeth; all thrown together fresh from mouths to ferment in oak like some trophy.

She raises a shaking hand to her face and drops it just as fast, hesitant to touch her own skin after handling the lid.

Anana thinks of Anne’s face, calm, subservient, and the flash of pleasure around her soft eyes when Peter had taken her hand after they’d left this room, and the weight of it presses down and down and _down_ on Anana’s lungs until she can barely breathe.

She has to find Sergio.

\--

Another door in the cellar room opens to the outside of the Abbey, where weak sunlight peeks through a low bank of clouds; usually Pacific Northwest weather feels oppressive compared to the open skies of home, but for a moment she stands with her back against the wall and lets the watery light filter through her closed eyelids.

The breeze, too humid, too warm, is still clean, and after a few moments the dank room fades from the front of her mind. She blows out a breath.

_Shake it off, there's work to do._

She scrubs at her nose with her sleeve and heads toward the front of the Abbey, treading close to the wall. The sooner she gets away from this side the better; the closer she is to the main entrance, the less suspicion she'll raise if she's seen.

So they have at least one barrel of human teeth. It doesn’t automatically mean it's because of wide-scale murder. On the other hand, there was a dining hall’s worth of dead families two days ago, so wide-scale murder is definitely still on the table.

Sergio should really be the one handling this shit. He’s the one they send for espionage, the creative problem-solver who can open any door. She’s just the one they hand a rifle and point toward some rooftop—

_“Pretty soon we’re gonna have to get you some hokey trophy with words on it, like maybe ‘Best Shot In Village of Forty-Eight People, Half Of Them Have Cataracts’”—_

_Oh, Tulok._

She rounds the corner to the front of the Abbey.

She’s halfway to the front door when she hears voices through cracked-open windows, heading back in the direction she’d come from.

Impossible to tell who she’s tailing, but it’s a thread to pull on. She turns around and follows the sound toward the bell tower.

\--

She has to pick the lock on the tower’s external door. It goes smoother than the lock in the basement; it wouldn’t surprise her if they use the same key, if _all_ the locks use the same key, and if the only person who has access to the keys controls the whole damn Abbey.

Last night she’d stuffed a shim into the space between the bolt and strike plate of her room because all the bedroom doors have locks, but none of them have locks that lock from the _inside_.

When the door quietly swings open she feels a wash of relief: Sergio’s voice drifts down the curling stairs, and a woman’s voice too; Sister Amy’s, at a guess.

Anana leans against a support beam and waits. She can’t quite make out the words but smiles at the sarcasm in Sergio’s tone. Whatever he's bitching about, when he comes back down she’ll make sure he knows babysitting is better than finding piles of _teeth_ in a creepy-ass basement.

Hand on her watch says it's a little past fourteen hundred hours. Her mouth twists; probably about time for another fake meal from a pouch. She’ll wait to grab her bag from her room until after Sergio’s finished—

She’s already a third of the way up the steps by the time she registers the sounds of breaking wood and shattered glass, halfway up when the hoarse yelling starts. When the body drops with a heavy, meaty thump, she doesn’t look down. She doesn’t look up, and once her foot hits the top step the gun’s in her hand with the safety off.

The girl crumples a second later, spilling halfway over the edge, and it’s only then that Anana pauses to survey the room, empty; only then that she steps forward and looks down.

She’s on her stomach before she has time to realize why. When Sergio’s suddenly, inexplicably lying beside her, chest heaving, she wonders why her arms are shaking too hard for her to push herself up.

Time starts again and along with it the noise: a crashing wall of sound floods her ears that gradually melts itself into the pulse of her heartbeat.

She looks at his face, pale, damp with cold sweat. Alive.

The next person to lay a hand on him will end up like the last.

\--

They make their way down the stairs in silence, the box containing Mother tucked under one of Anana’s arms, her other around Sergio. Her legs tremble; she's not fully sure who's supporting who.

At the bottom, Anana stops. She looks at Landry.

“I thought it was you.”

There's nothing else to say. There's nothing else that matters.

\--

When Anana hands Julia the box, a full, true smile diffuses over her face as she lifts the lid and looks inside.

“You just saved the world,” she says, almost disbelievingly. “I’ll call my associates. We’ll be out tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest. You look like hell,” she adds, almost as an afterthought. “What happened?”

“Amy’s dead,” Sergio says flatly. “Landry too. They forced our hand.”

Julia sighs and sets down the box.

“I suspected Amy was behind all this. I’ll take care of informing Anne. You’ve both done enough.”

Anana brushes sweat from her forehead; it’s muggy, and all she wants at this point is a shower, two beers, and a full night’s sleep. She might at least get two out of three if she keeps her mouth shut, but instead she hears herself saying, “if Amy was behind this I don’t think she was alone. I followed Anne and Peter into the basement. There’s a room down there with barrels full of teeth.”

“Teeth,” Sergio repeats, staring at her like this is something she might have considered mentioning before. She shrugs.

“It’s why I went to find you. I must have gotten distracted by your little fistfight,” she adds, a droll understatement. Even that much is hard to say.

Julia reaches over the counter for her backpack on a chair and says, “I don’t know what Peter’s doing tied up in this but that’s the CDC’s problem now. Whatever’s going on in this place is no longer our concern. You can look into it more if you want, or you can get cleaned up and get some rest.”

Her lips twist in amusement as she rummages through her bag for her satellite phone. “I can tell you which I’d rather do, but somebody has to make sure they call off the apocalypse.”

\--

The small hospital ward feels more peaceful than the rest of the Abbey. Maybe nobody’s been murdered in here for a while. At the very least, not that anybody's mentioned.

“You should keep the sweater,” Anana murmurs, helping Sergio pull the fabric down his back without catching it on his bandaged shoulder. There’s a patch of already-dried blood where a cut from being thrown into something by Landry had bled through, but the fabric itself is still intact. “It’s tougher than you are.”

She runs her hands down the sides of his face and gently tilts his chin up with her thumbs; he glances at her and away, obviously uncomfortable with her touch, or at least with what she’s trying to say by it. If she pushes him too far, something cutting and evasive will come out of his mouth, whether he wants it to or not. It’s what she gets for loving somebody buried under tripwire.

Usually, she can step back, give him space. This bitch of a day is making it hard.

The door opens; she pivots, reaching for her gun. Sergio’s hand closes around her forearm before she can pull it from the holster.

Sarah stands in the doorway and hesitantly raises her hands.

“I’m sorry if this is a bad time, but I really need to come in.”

Anana’s hand drops to her side. “Sorry.”

Sarah looks briefly in her direction and then systematically moves around the room opening each cabinet and drawer.

“It’s okay,” Sarah says, closing the last cabinet. “This is a long shot, but have you seen any prenatal support units? They’d look like glass cylinders,” she says, motioning with her hands about how big.

Anana shakes her head at the same time as Sergio says, “why, does somebody need to put a fetus in a jar?”, and she resists the urge to kick him in the shin.

Looking down, Sarah blows out a breath, and then meets his eyes. “Actually, yeah.”

She unzips her backpack and pulls down the front flap, revealing a fetus floating in a glowing tank. It's the strangest thing Anana has seen so far on this shitty island and that's saying something.

“That yours?” Anana asks at last, when she’s done staring at it, and Sarah nods.

“It’s leaking.” Sarah zips up the bag again and shoulders it. “If I don’t find a new unit he’s gonna die. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of.”

“How much of the basement have you tried?”

Sarah shrugs hopelessly, a muted motion under the weight of her backpack. “Not a lot. I wouldn’t know where to start, and some of the rooms are locked.”

Anana looks at Sergio, who purses his mouth in disapproval, but he watches the way Anana looks at Sarah’s backpack and stays silent.

“We can help with that,” Anana says.

\--

“I couldn’t help noticing he has your eyes,” Sergio remarks while they’re walking through a dark stretch of basement hallway. At least they have flashlights; following Anne earlier in the day, Anana had been forced to move around in the dark. “How exactly does that work?”

“It's complicated,” Sarah says, tugging at the straps on her backpack to redistribute the weight. “I'm hoping if I bring him to Ilaria they can help me figure out how to help him.”

“I’d be careful,” Anana says tightly. “They might not give him back.”

Sarah looks at her, obviously curious, but she doesn’t push. Before Anana has time to volunteer something she'll regret, they come through a grey stone archway into a space she recognizes: down toward one end are stacks of crates and broken farming equipment.

She points to the left. “The teeth were down that way.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Sergio says, looking vaguely nauseous.

Sarah pauses, peering down the hall. “I’m pretty sure the room where they took him out of me is to the right. I’ve already searched that way.”

 _Took him out._ It makes sense; if the prenatal units came from here, that must be how he’d ended up in one. Maybe it was a medical necessity.

“That happened here?” Sergio asks, motioning at her backpack with his chin.

Sarah’s fists clench, eyes fierce. “Yeah, thanks to Amy. She deserved what she got.”

Not a medical necessity, then. Christ.

Anana leads the way down the left branch of the hall, checking rooms as they go. The ones that aren't empty contain miscellaneous supplies no one would need to access frequently: stacks of bed frames or chairs, crates of paving material or bricks.

When they get to the door next to where she'd hidden, she lets Sergio work on the lock, and tries not to feel too humiliated when it takes him a little under twenty seconds, not that she’s counting.

“You don’t need to bend the pin that much,” he says, handing the bobby pins she’d used previously back to her. She snatches them from his hand and drops them into her coat pocket with a scowl.

“I’m still a better shot,” she mutters, ignoring his smug smile as she pushes past him into the room.

The barrel’s where it was before, and it smells just as bad. He shines his flashlight into it and slides the lid back into place with disgust.

“That’s a lot of teeth.”

“No shit. I said a barrel full of teeth. _That’s exactly what I meant_.”

Standing to the side, Sarah taps her fingers on her hips and frowns at the dusty floor. “On my way here I saw hundreds of skulls in the woods. Maybe thousands.” She looks up. “None of them had teeth.”

“Okay, fuck this place,” Anana says abruptly, turning on her heel toward the door. “Feel free to catch up when you're done.”

\--

The last place they look has a bar across the door in addition to a lock.

Sarah lifts the board out of the way. “You think it leads outside?”

Anana, waiting for Sergio to open the lock, shakes her head. “We’re nowhere near the building perimeter.”

“Then why do they need to block it off?”

“Guess we get to find out,” Anana says, and steps around Sergio into the room.

The lights are already on, dim and yellow. After a few steps she jerks to a halt, eyes stinging from the undiluted ammonia stench of piss. She chokes on the taste of it in the air but finds she can’t swallow properly; her eyes are locked on rows of hammocks, tied wrists, spread legs—

“ _Shit_ ,” she hears, and then Sergio grabs her by the shoulder.

“Get out,” he says, shoving her roughly toward the door. “Anana, _go._ ”

She stumbles when he pushes her, but her legs seem to have stopped working. Filthy gowns aren’t enough to hide the curve of rounded bellies.

He steps in front of her and blocks her line of sight, but it doesn't block the _sound_.

Dimly she realizes her face is wet. She's not sure how long she's been standing there when he reaches for her arms, but it's enough to startle her into motion: she yanks out of his touch and steps back, and then she wipes her eyes on her sleeve and pushes past him.

When she reaches the closest hammock she sees blood crusted down the girl’s wrists, empty eyes, a severed umbilical cord trailing between ashen legs.

Something cracks, deep in her chest.

It doesn’t get any better from there.

\--

While Sergio and Julia discuss what happened in the basement, Anana stands on the other side of the CDC lab’s plastic divider and stares out the window.

After a few minutes, she hears the crisp sound of the plastic parting behind her, and a cool hand settles on her shoulder.

“I just wanted you to know I’ve arranged for those women you freed to receive medical attention,” Julia says. “There won't be room to take them with us in the morning but they’ll have doctors here in forty-eight hours.”

Julia must have run into issues getting them off the island tonight. Turning toward her, Anana leans her shoulder against the high windowsill and lifts her chin.

“I bet Ilaria would find it easier if they just disappeared.”

“Ilaria has no reason to harm them,” Julia says, confusion on her face. “Why would they?”

With a derisive snort Anana says, “what makes you think they have a reason for even _half_ the shit they do?”

Julia sighs.

“The Board and I don’t always agree on how to handle a situation, but they generally let me win the little things. I promise they'll be safe.”

“Is that what two dozen lives are to you, ‘the little things?’”

“In the broad scheme of things, yes,” she says, crossing her arms.

“I can see where you get it from,” Anana says. She's surprised by the forcefulness behind it. “That’s what Hatake thought too.”

For a moment there’s only silence. She wonders if she’s gone too far, but there’s a wall of children’s faces waiting for her when she closes her eyes every night and now a roomful of women too, and even after everything that's happened, Julia has the nerve to stand there with her head so far up her own tight ass that she sees saving other people’s lives as a _favor_.

A little anger seems pretty goddamn justified.

“I’m not my father,” Julia says at last. “Just a person trying to do good where I can.”

She squeezes Anana’s shoulder once, and then she lifts the plastic and steps back into the bubble of the lab.

Clenching her fists, Anana slips from the room.

\--

Sarah finds her in the hallway. She slides down next to where Anana rests with her back against the wall.

“Thank you for helping me.”

“You get what you needed?” Anana asks, sounding hoarse to her own ears. She remembers Sarah moving through that torture room alongside her, untying wrists, but not a hell of a lot else about what she was doing after.

Sarah hugs her elbows and nods. “Things were rough in there. If you want to talk, I’m here.”

There isn't much Anana wants to say about it, but she doesn't mind the company. Someone who's gone through what this girl has might actually understand, if Anana ever feels like talking about the part of her life she doesn't want to think of even _more_ than she doesn't want to think about that basement.

“That woman wasn’t dead long,” Anana says at last, because anger’s an emotion she can do right now. Maybe the _only_ emotion. “Less than a day.”

Sarah nods. “No rigor mortis. I noticed that too. And I think she'd just had a baby. On her own, not after she died.”

A baby that’s missing.

“Then I’ll find out who took it,” Anana says, turning her gun over in her hand, “and we’ll be having a conversation.”

**Author's Note:**

> You remember how I said I never, ever post incomplete works? haha. ha
> 
> If you're not one of the approx. three people I know who comprise this fandom everywhere in the vast hellscape we call the internet, come say hello! My tumblr's [philosoverted.](https://philosoverted.tumblr.com/)


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